A few weeks back I signed up for TikTok, after years of fighting it.
It felt inevitable — my kids use it, the news quotes it, even the local police have accounts there. So I figured: fine, I’ll cave. I’m willing to reassess my biased opinion that TikTok is a waste of time. Perhaps there is something there after all.
At first I thought I’d done something wrong.
I tried carefully to curate the feed. Over and over again.
But no matter what I did, all I got was the same attention-hungry nonsense.
LOUD.
FAST.
SHORT.
The moment I found something vaguely interesting — and to be honest I did find a lot of interesting bits — something else slammed into its place, leaving me frustrated and feeling like an idiot.
In the end it all felt like a mental game of whack-a-mole.
After two weeks I deleted the account.
Not because I couldn’t adapt — I simply refused to.
Adapting felt like surrendering to a destructive stream of fabricated rush. A fake sense of urgency that just went on and on and on. A relentless sprint toward nothing at all.
It has now been a few weeks since my brief interaction with TikTok, and to be honest I feel much the same — at varying degrees — about most social media. Looking back, I truly feel I dodged a bullet. I could just as well have stuck to it and made peace with the fact that this is the way we consume media these days. Glad I didn’t.
As a stark contrast, I recently read a piece here on Medium by Utsuk Agarwal. To be fair, it was a variation on something many self-help writers have published — I don’t know who deserves the original credit. It was one of those “morning habits” pieces. But one of the suggested habits really struck me:
Start the day with sunlight.
Go outside and let your body know that it is daytime. Time to wake up.
So I tried it.
I got up, made the bed, drank a glass of water, slipped into my robe, and stepped outside. It was a gray morning, but still light enough to matter. I stood there for five minutes, letting my eyes take in the sky and doing very little else. Hmm, that felt surprisingly good.
The important part wasn’t the sunlight. It was what I left behind indoors. My phone. The news. The instant rush to “catch up.” For five minutes at the start of my day I simply wasn’t available to anyone but myself. And that small act felt almost radical. I actually felt reluctant to go back inside and face the digital noise.
How messed up is that? Being so blinded by screens that I hadn’t realized how much just stepping outside helped “set the stage” for the day.
Why had I not done this sooner?
Slow is hard.
Even after realizing that such a small change felt revolutionary — and that I was really onto something — I still slip back into rushing through everyday life. I rush to publish a thought before it goes stale (God knows how many times I’ve had to stop myself from publishing this piece prematurely). I buy stocks hoping for quick returns, then sell too soon — just before the real move happens. I squeeze in one more customer, thinking it will create space later to wind down, only to fill that new void with another commitment, and then doing it all over again.
I crave optimization of my schedule.
I crave instant feedback on my work.
I crave gratification on every change in my life, instantly.
When I don’t get it I lose interest and move on to the next item on the never-ending list that is… everyday life.
I suddenly realize that I am my own TikTok.
I am the very thing I despise.
Oh, the irony is not lost on me…
When I do, and I do occasionally, step out of the hamster wheel, my mind feels like it needs hours just to catch up. I have a backlog of unprocessed thoughts. This has the rather unflattering effect of me easily getting annoyed when things that should be my top priorities distract me from “clearing the queue.” A kid asking the same question for the eleventh time. A wife wanting to go for a walk. A friend calling out of the blue.
Can they not see that I’m in Do Not Disturb-mode?
Well, why would they?
Ask me what I’m doing that is so terribly important that I cannot prioritize them right now — “Well, I’m currently processing my internal backlog from the last couple of days. Check back with me in, say, one or two business days.”
When I put this in writing I’m sometimes surprised I even have friends and family…!
So, taking a step back and looking at my situation from a sane point of view: Surely it isn’t meant to be this way?
Thoughts should be processed as they come. Not be piled up for later use.
A backlog isn’t reflection, even if I sometimes fool myself into thinking it is — it’s just evidence that I’ve been TikTok-ing my own mind: rushing to the next thought, skipping to the end, scrolling past the point, giving in to the loudest voice.
Ditching TikTok, in combination with my new morning routine of getting a few minutes of outside daylight before engaging in anything else, has led me to understand — through the contrast between those two things — that I need to slow down. Not do less, just not rush things.
I started a journey toward… slowness…?
No, I needed a better word. Lingering.
Yes, like the Cranberries song. But also a surprisingly good word.
I started a journey toward lingering — almost by accident. Those five minutes of sunshine sparked a need for change in my life. So now I’m trying to build more deliberate pauses into my days. Five minutes of light in the morning, as a start. I’ve also bought myself — let’s not get into the consumer madness, that’s a story for another day — a ReMarkable tablet and begun keeping a handwritten evening journal. Even simple handwritten notes during the day have proven useful, giving my thoughts a place to, again, linger until I have time to act on them.
Sometimes I realize that jotting them down was all that was needed. No need to act on them at all. Giving me a sense of perspective and clarity as to what matters. These are small steps, but they already feel like they might add up to something bigger.
I’m also experimenting with slowing down the way I work. Letting an email sit overnight before I reply. Giving myself an extra day to finish a draft. Saying no even though my calendar is not full, giving me the time needed to keep a slower pace. More and more every day I realize that rushing rarely makes things better — it just makes them noisier.
None of this comes naturally. My instinct is still to optimize, to hurry, to tick the next box. It’s a struggle. But an intentional struggle.
I want my kids to believe that life can unfold at a human pace, not TikTok pace.
For them to believe that, I need to show them what that actually looks like.
Let things unfold.
Be okay with not fast-forwarding.
Linger.
